Just a question for those experiencing "laggy" posing of joints - Have you used the "CPU Assisted Bending" option in the Preferences menu? (Or, is that available in the Mac version?)

Be warned, this can bork up rendering in my experience, so use it when you're setting things up, but turn it off before rendering, else it can conflict with itself.. for some reason. (I tend to "render in background" so that could be the issue, since it's trying to reserve some of the power for the CPU-assist.)

=> Set render engine to Preview or FireFly. (in the Render settings menu)

I don't use SuperFly for anything (for a variety of reasons). So I only render in Firefly.

In the Preview settings, I have hardware shading, shadows, anti-aliasing, and mip-maps all turned OFF, with transparency limited to 90% and texture resolution at 512k.

@morkonan: I've had the laggy problem with "multi-threaded bending" ON as well as OFF in the Preferences. I think that's what you're referring to? Having it ON seems to "break" the HW Horse's tail, oddly enough.

Poser slows down for me after I've had it open a few hours, no matter what, or if I try to work with more than 2-3 figures (V4/M4) in a scene. But it's particularly bad when I add in the HiveWire Horse, which is a bummer b/c I had wanted two of my graphic novel characters to go on regular trail rides. As a lifelong horse person myself, I appreciate the attention to detail that went into modeling the HW Horse, but I kinda wonder if it's meant to be used on its own, for "wild mane" fantasy shots, rather than as a horse for characters to ride.

I've done multiple person + Hivewire horse and never had this lag issue. But, I'm on Windows, so perhaps that's the difference. Below are both Superfly renders.

I think most of the people who've had trouble posing the HW Horse with tack and riders in the scene have been on Macs, so perhaps the problem is due to some aspect of Poser's memory management on the Mac OS? I use a MacBook Pro rather than a desktop machine, so perhaps that's also a factor.

Other factors that might produce different experiences include Preview settings and how users prefer to work while in the Pose room. I've tried to minimize the performance impact of textures through various Preview settings, and I try to dial in poses and expressions for each character (human or equine) in its own scene file, before I bring everything together. But it's inevitable that I'll want to spend some time playing around with different pose and expression dials once I see everything together, and I'll most likely want to try different combinations of poses and expressions on separate keyframes. In other words, I might spend a lot more time fiddling with parameter dials than other users.

My eventual goal is to produce series of shots to use in a graphic novel, so if I want two characters to go on a trail ride, then I'll probably need at least 6-7 shots from various angles to go along with the dialogue. But right now, when I have two V4 riders and two HW horses in a scene (w/ various items set to wireframe), Poser slows down to the point that it takes ages for any parameter dial I turn to have an effect. That's frustrating enough when it comes to finding the right expression for a single shot, but it would quickly become unbearable if I was trying to get the variety of expressions and poses I'd need for a series of shots.

I don't have any performance problems when it comes to actual renders, which I do in Firefly in part b/c I'm going for a stylized (and not photo-realistic) look. It's the posing that's the problem.

Here's a draft render of what was going to be the first in a series of trail riding shots, until the parameter dial slow-downs drove me too nuts to continue!

@Glitterati3D: Great expression on the rider taking the horse over a fence! She looks as surprised as I would be to find that it's possible to jump in a dressage saddle! :-)

At least on Mac Posers performance with conformers is terrible slow. Its not only the HW horse. Every conformer with lots of morphs or extra bones slows Poser extremely down.
Last thing i tried was the old ’Hanyma Vengeance’ outfit by Aeon Soul. I conformed this set to a V4 (with the X&M fixes, M++). This already took very long. But when i tried to pose one of the cables from the jacket things went so unbelievable slow that it was completely unusable. Something like 1.5 seconds of freeze every time dialing one of the ’move cable’ sliders :-( That can’t be called posing anymore.
Since posing and dressing dolls is the only use case left for Poser on my side. I start wondering if Poser is of any use for me anymore…

In case Mac users want to see this issue fixed i highly recommend to report your performance issues to tech support!

I did so several years ago and uploaded some test scenes for them.
What they answered in short:

We can not reproduce any slowdowns on our Macs. (haha)

There are no other reports about any slowdowns.

You make a very good point, nagra_00_! I've never contacted tech support for any software in the past, as I can usually figure stuff out through creative Google searches. But now I can see the downside of that approach: that the developers will never know how many people are having a particular issue if those people don't report them.

However, I know for a fact (as a result of my Google-fu!) that other Mac users have reported the slow performance issues to SM, so I don't know why they'd say otherwise. As for not being able to reproduce the problems on their Macs, that's not even relevant unless they're using those Macs for all their computing needs AND the Macs have the variety of configurations their customers likely do (including laptops, which is all I use).

Every time Poser crashes on my MacBook (~ once a day), the developers are supposed to get a copy of the crash report -- but I don't know if they ever look at those!

I never made a google search to find out if other users have reported the same performance problems… i’d better had done so ;)

Well for the configuration, i have this issue on my Mac Pro and two Mac Mini (which is in regard to hardware close to a laptop). Having noticed exact the same problem on 3 different versions of Mac OS X and on working machines and on clean install machines with nothing installed besides Poser.

I am going to reopen my old case. BTW i checked the old entry and i opened the case at 24 Nov 2014. May 2015 was the last entry after a long but fruitless discussion with tech support.